Bulletin #2
"Since his death, Confucius has led a chequered career. Awarded the title
of 'Duke' five centuries after his death, he lost it again a thousand years
afterwards, only to be worshipped equally with Heaven four centuried
later. After another century, he is being harshly criticized. No one knows
what the future holds with regard to his reputation. True to his
reputation for equanimity, he has not complained much about these
reversals of fortune." (From DICTIONARY OF ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES by Stl
Elmo Nauman, Jr. - Philosophical Library, 1978)
THE SOLUBLE FISHERMAN; ( 11 November 1985) I admit my paranoia
sometimes getrs the better of me. In connection with Tom Coffin, driving
force behind THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, this has happened more than with
most. Speaking of the sixties, he says, in Vol. 2, #4 of OPEN CITY; "I never
felt personally that because we wore flowers in our lapels that meant we
were the wave of the future." My first suspicion: This is a trap; he wants
me to say: "What lapels?" How many even owned suits? And who doesn't
wear flowers in lapels? And why does Tom Coffin, in everything he says or
writes, always say something like that? And, yes, what lapels? #
Jacques Baron on Andre Breton: "...this cold-blooded animal has never
contributed anything but the rankest confusion to whatever he has been
involved in." Andre Breton on the soldier as art critic: "...I cannot help but
consider the constitution -- both of men and events -- of scientific
socialism as a model school. As a school of an ever more profound
understanding of human need which must aim, in all areas and on the
largest possible scale, at finding satisfaction, but also as a school where
each person must be free to express in any and every circumstance his way
of seeing things, and must be ready to justify endlessly the
non-domestication of his spirit." (Hear! Hear!)
I found something at last in THE MANIFESTOES OF SURREALISM that I
cannot disagree with -- except for some perhaps mischievously confusing
rhetoric at the top of the second pate -- his address to Czhech
Communists in 1936. On the whole it was a beautifully and untypically
coherent statement -- with more than just the usual few brilliant
quotable lines to recommend it, defining precisely his objections to
Socialist Realism. The end for social organization to serve not, except
incidentally, a means. Although there is a quote from Trotsky about
winning bread and poetry. Thus Breton wound up much positioned as a
physicist justifying pure research -- well and good as far as it went. Also
by quoting authorities who denied, without evidence, that art is bourgeois
propaganda, he weakened his argument. Art, as he points out elsewhere, is
pressed into service of capitalist culture via co-optive methods
(principally renumeration). It is a failure of socialism to wish upon it a
similar role of servitude under socialist regimes -- resorting besides to
even cruder methods. Liberating art from social co-option altogether
makes sense in revolutionary terms. BREAD AND POETRY!
-- Kerry Wendell Thornley 1986
KULTCHA
c 1984 Kerry W. Thornley
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